- The Opie Oeuvre
The connection between the Oxford University Press and me and my husband Peter began in the Bodleian Library, under Duke Humfrey's painted roof on which is repeated the necessary prayer "Dominus illuminatio mea." It was late in 1946, we were both in our twenties, and I was great with our second child. We were copying, frantically, from the eighteenth century children's books left to the library by Francis Douce. The Keeper of Western Manuscripts, Dr. R. W. Hunt, prowling benignly between the desks, came and asked us what we were working on. "Nursery rhymes," we said, feeling rather foolish. "Oh yes? Tell me more." We explained that we envisaged a dictionary of nursery rhymes, giving their histories and variations, and that our model, as far as there could be one, was Miss Withycombe's Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names. "Betty Withycombe? A great friend of mine," he said. "You must come and have coffee and meet her." Later, over coffee at 44 Walton Street, they suggested that OUP might be interested in the book; and, later still, OUP said that they might indeed consider "a small corpus on the subject."
At home, in Weyborne Cottage near Farnham in Surrey, Peter and I condensed our manuscript into a small corpus and sent it off to Oxford. Apart from an acknowledgement, we heard nothing for six months. The Press, we learnt afterwards, had sent the manuscript to the surviving editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, Sir William Craigie and Dr. C. T. Onions, for their opinion; and, since they could find no fault in it, the Press proposed drawing up a contract for a work to be titled The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. They would, however, like the present MS to be somewhat expanded.
We have always been grateful to OUP for having had the courage and imagination to confer the dignified appellation of "Oxford Dictionary" on a work of nurserical scholarship. The juxtaposition apparently pleased others as well, for, when the book eventually appeared in 1951, it was greeted by a Fourth Leader in the Times.
The question everyone asks about a life's-work is "How did it begin?" Our work began because we were both people who suffered from insatiable curiosity. It also began with our getting married. Peter had been a writer from the age of six when, invited to contribute to the school magazine, he wrote a story about tiger shooting (his parents being in India) which ended "Shoot! Bang! Fire!" and decided that writing was the only thing worth doing in life. By the time I married him, when he was twenty-four, he had published an autobiography and a collection of short stories and had nearly finished a second autobiography. The elders of the family, however, did not see that his writing was likely to bring in an adequate income, which was true enough, so he was gently coerced into taking a "proper job" with a publisher of reference books off Fleet Street. Then came the "doodle bugs," and in the summer of 1944 the firm was evacuated to Bedfordshire; and I, pregnant with our first child, went with them.
The nursery rhyme quest started when we were walking beside a cornfield, and Peter, seeing a ladybird, took it onto his finger and said to it the rhyme we had both known since childhood: "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, Your house is on fire and your children all gone." Suddenly we wondered, "How old is the rhyme, and what on earth does it mean?" Being in a small country village we could not find out, but the next week we escaped to London and in the Kensington Public Library were handed J. O. Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes, 1842, and Popular Rhymes, 1849. We did not find the answer to our question (we never have), but at least we discovered how international, and how apparently antique, such a rhyme can be.
Looking through Halliwell, we longed to follow up the clues he gave and to find out something about the rhymes for which he gave no annotations. We constructed a file of all kinds of traditional rhymes...